At 06:48 PM 2/13/2002, David Elliott wrote:
>The main problem with LGPL is that once we go there we can never go back.
I agree.
>Wine cannot stay X11 free-for-all forever.
Why not? BSD has. X11 has. Apache has.
>Reminds me of one of Roger Ebert's columns about the movie "It's a
>Wonderfull Life". Because the movie is now public domain, anyone can
>use the original print for whatever purpose. This includes colorizing
>it and then selling the colorized version for a lot of cash (thanks
>Ted... yeah right). The colorized version is a bastardization of the
>movie and is one of those cases where you almost wish that copyrights
>didn't expire. Especially considering that the director and the much of
>the cast were still alive to see this horrible, horrible thing.
I happen to agree, though I don't think it's "horrible" -- just weird.
The best thing we can do is vote with our feet and not buy or rent that
version. The same would be true of a bad commercial version of WINE.
>However, the X11 license has the great advantage that it is extremely
>flexible. So flexible that anyone who wanted to could take the tree and
>release it under any other license.
Actually, no. You can't change the license on existing code. But you can
combine
it with code that's licensed differently.
>Looking at some of the more popular BSD-type licensed projects, many of
>them have this sort of non-profit set-up. Apache would be the one that
>springs to mind immediately, I'm sure there are others.
FreeBSD and NetBSD do as well. But they administer the trademarks and handle
contributions; they don't try to restrict access to the code.
--Brett